Hidden interface controls are affecting usability
206 comments
·July 5, 2025BLKNSLVR
Animats
> I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.
Such ambiguous switches are often associated with "opt out" misfeatures.
userbinator
I hate toggle switches IRL too. They are just as ambiguous there. Checkboxes and pushed-in buttons are far clearer, but have unfortunately been sacrificed at the altar of "modernity".
panzi
There was such a confusing toggle at the ticket machines for the train here in Austria many years ago. It was for immediately validating your ticket, which is a potentially costly mistake.
About the scroll bars: Also stop making them so thin that I have to have FPS skills to hit them! Looking at you, Firefox! (And possibly what standard CSS allows?) Yeah, I can scroll, but horizontally the scrollbar would be more convenient than pressing shift with my other hand.
anjel
Firefox nonobviousity: Type in about:config in your address bar Search for widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override Edit it to whatever number you want You can also edit widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style to change the shape of it, set it to 4 for a nice chonk rectangle Finally, turn on “Always show scrollbars” in the normal settings window about:settings if you want them always on.
jama211
I’ve never known until this moment that shift makes you scroll horizontally, because I’ve always either used a mouse with horizontal scrolling built into the scroll wheel, or a touchpad.
IggleSniggle
Right! If you want it to denote an action, you need to include the verb: "TURN ON" would be entirely clear. It's even clear if you sometimes DO want to show state / not a button "IS ON" is also perfectly clear. There's only a few that might he confused when the verb is shown, like "INCREASE," although I would have to work a little to imagine the UI where it's not clear whether the button is showing the verb or noun.
foo42
you can get the same issue with icons too. The one that gives me anxiety is the microphone with a line through on a button. I _am_ muted or I should click to _mute_. If my kids are arguing in the background and it's an important call it can feel like a high stakes thing to get wrong and often times it only becomes clear what state I'm in by toggling a few times. Does the icon change to a mic without a line when I click or does the previously shown mic with a line now get coloured in, what does _that_ mean?
TylerE
One of my big beefs with modern UI is two-state controls where it's impossible to determine what the current state actually is. Like a button that says "Music Off" where it's unclear if that means the music is CURRENTLY off, or if clicking the button turns it off.
khaki54
Yep the best example. Especially if the result is not immediately obvious. Am I commanding "system on" or are you telling me "system on"
jagged-chisel
Similarly, I can’t tell which state the control is in until I touch it.
msephton
In macOS you can have the scroll bar always on, globally (using System Settings) or per-app (using Terminal command)
porker
But can I make them wider? I don't have the precision to hit something that narrow.
(Most of the time I use the scroll gesture on the trackpad to get round this)
wpm
They’re still too thin, and they look awful to boot.
chrisandchris
Reading through the responses of your comment, I came to the conclusion that the topic is on point. There are many complains about people missing things (please add ...), and people responding with a solution because it's already there - just hidden.
rkagerer
And please support PgUp and PgDn while you're at it.
hn111
on MacOS you can use Fn+Up and Fn+Down
paleotrope
I can't recall the app but it was a similar toggle with a label, when you flipped the toggle the label lit up green indicating it was turned on. But the default state was off but how would you know?
BLKNSLVR
The green / red is at least a half decent indicator (questionable for the colour blind folks though), but the current trend of very slightly different shades of grey is the pinnacle of utterly fucking stupid design; perfect for a non-interactive set piece in a gallery, just dumb for use for by human beings.
cgriswald
I have to believe in the case of cookie banners it is intentional.
WarOnPrivacy
I drive a Toyota that is nearly old enough to run for US Senator. Every control in the car is visible, clearly labeled and is distinct to the touch - at all times. The action isn't impeded by routine activity or maintenance (ex:battery change).
Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.
makeitdouble
I'm sympathetic , but think it's a disservice to the designers to present it like that:
> Every control in the car is visible
No. And that would be horrible.
Every control _critically needed while driving_ is visible and accessible. Controls that matter less can be smaller and more convoluted, or straight hidden.
The levers to adjust seat high and positions are hidden while still accessible. The latch to open the car good can (should ?) be less accessible and can be harder to find.
There are a myriad of subtle and opinionated choices to make the interface efficient. There's nothing trivial or really "simple" about that design process, and IMHO brushing over that is part of what leads us to the current situation where car makers just ignore these considerations.
ringeryless
i disagree. i only want minimalist functionality and therefore it's reasonable to have ALL controls always present and physical. someone needs to have the courage to say no to features that will get people killed. a simple gun doesn't jam in the heat of battle. u my 1989 Toyota corolla has manual windows and that is great.
swiftcoder
The good news over here is that the European NCAP is now mandating they put a bunch of those physical controls back if they want a 5-star safety rating. Would not be sorry to say good bye to the awful touchscreen UI in my car...
aikinai
It's cost, not competence. These days making a touch screen is easier and cheaper than manufacturing and assembling lots of little buttons and knobs.
gblargg
It allows UI designers to add nearly endless settings and controls where they were before limited by dash space. It's similar to how everything having flash for firmware allows shipping buggy products that they justify because they can always fix it with a firmware update.
djoldman
Is this true given all the chips modern cars have, all the programming that must be done, and all the complex testing and QA required for the multitude of extra function?
I would gladly gladly keep my AC, heat, hazards, blinkers, wipers, maybe a few other buttons and that's it. I don't need back cameras, lane assist, etc.
I find it hard to believe it's cheaper to have all the cameras, chips, and other digital affordances rather than a small number of analog buttons and functions.
hahn-kev
In some countries it's a legal requirement to have a backup camera, which means you need a screen to display it, and hardware to render it.
bongodongobob
You're not thinking about the manufacturing part. Buttons and knobs have to get assembled and physically put into every car. Software just needs to be written once.
gaudystead
One of the reasons I purchased a (newer but used Mazda) was because it still has buttons and knobs right next to the driver's right hand in the center console. I can operate parts of the car without even having to look.
(another reason was because it still has a geared transmission instead of a CVT, but that's a separate discussion)
grugagag
Look ma, I can change the air conditioning controls without looking moment.
A friend got a tesla on lease and it was quite cheap, 250/month. Been driven in that car a few times and was able to study the driver using the controls and it’s hideusly badly designed, driver has to take eyes off the road and deep dive in menus. Plus that slapped tablet in the middle is busy to look at, tiring and distacting. The 3d view of other cars/ pedestrians is a gimmick, or at least it looks like one to me. Does anyone actually like that? Perhaps im outdated or something but I wouldn’t consider such a bad UX in a car.
bluGill
My newer phev saves me a large pile of money ever month in gas. Not as much as payments, but closer than you would think.
PoshBreeze
This is often repeated but I don't believe this for a second. I have an 90s vehicle which is based on 60/70s technology. A switch for a fog light is like £10 on ebay for a replacement and I know I am not paying anywhere near cost i.e. I am being ripped off.
seanmcdirmid
I'm pretty sure that simple switch is something directly in the circuit for the fog light, and there is a dedicated wire between the fog light, the switch, and the fuse box. And if its an old Jag, those wires flake out and have to be redone at great expense.
Compare this to the databus that is used in today's cars, it really isn't even a fair comparison on cost (you don't have to have 100 wires running through different places in your car, just one bus to 100 things and signal is separated from power).
WarOnPrivacy
> It's cost, not competence.
This implies it's a consequential cost. Building with tactile controls would take the (already considerable) purchase price and boost that high enough to impact sales.
If tactile controls were a meaningful cost difference, then budget cars with tactile controls shouldn't be common - in any market.
hinterlands
Are controls uniquely important, though? There are hundreds of things in a car that could be made better (more durable, longer lasting, better looking) for just $10 to $100 extra a piece. But it adds up.
It's not just cost, though. The reality is that consumers like the futuristic look, in theory (i.e., at the time of the purchase). Knobs look dated. It's the same reason why ridiculously glossy laptop screens were commonplace. They weren't cheaper to make, they just looked cool.
seanmcdirmid
Not just that, wiring it in to the single control bus is easier, otherwise you are stuck doing an analog to digital conversion anyways. Even new cars that have separate controls, these are mostly capacitive buttons or dials that simply send a fixed signal on the bus (so your dial will go all the way around, because it isn't actually the single volume control on the radio, but just a turn the volume up or down control).
Most of the cost savings is in having a single bus to wire up through the car, then everything needs a little computer in it to send on that bus...so a screen wins out.
bluGill
Most of the seeming analog controls on cars switched to digital in the 1990s. The digital control bus saved several hundred dollars per car. It still looked analog until around 2010 when touch screen started taking over.
Aeolun
I’m not sure if this is actually true for the volumes produced by the big carmakers. You’d very quickly get to volumes that make the largest component the material cost.
_kidlike
I had similar discussions with my father who started his career in the 80s as an engineer, and has been a CEO for the last ~15 years. The discussion was a bit broader, about engineering and quality/usability in everything.
His perspective was that companies were "run" by engineers first, then a few decades later by managers, and then by marketing.
Who knows what's next, maybe nothing (as in all decisions are accidentally made by AI because everyone at all levels just asks AI). Could be better than our current marketing-driven universe.
citizenpaul
I commented on here about the surge in US car mfg recruiters contacting me about working on their new car systems. The HN opinion seemed to that they are complete disasters and stay away if I value my sanity.
null
staplers
Because it can be trivially duplicated
marginalia_nu
Has this cost risen?
Why is this so expensive it can't even be put into a premium car today when it used to be ubiquitous in even the cheapest hardware a few decades ago?
const_cast
Because most companies are ruthless penny-pinchers and over-optimizers. They're willing to burn dollars to save pennies. The reason is that they're trading things they can measure for things they can't.
Basically, if you remove the knobs you can save, say, 10 dollars on every vehicle. In return, you have made your car less attractive and will lose a small number of sales. You will never, ever be able to quantify that loss in sales. So, on paper, you've saved money for "free".
Typically, opportunity cost is impossible or close to impossible to measure. What these companies think they are doing is minimizing cost. Often, they are just maximizing opportunity cost of various decisions. Everyone is trying to subtly cut quality over time.
Going from A quality to B quality is pretty safe, it's likely close to zero consumers will notice. But then you say "well we went from A to B and nobody noticed, so nobody will notice B to C!". So you do it again. Then over and over. And, eventually, you go from a brand known for quality to cheap bargain-bin garbage. And it happened so slowly that leadership is left scratching their heads. Sometimes the company then implodes spontaneously, other times it slowly rots and loses to competitors. It's so common it feels almost inevitable.
Really, most companies don't have to do much to stay successful. For a lot of markets, they just have to keep doing what they're doing. Ah, but the taste of cost-cutting is much too seductive. They do not understand what they are risking.
bluGill
It was always expensive. Car makers need their cars to last (the used market is imbortant since few can afford a new car the scrap in 3 years) so they are not buying the cheap switches. a cherry mx will run near a dollar each in quantity. Then you put the cap an it plus wires and it adds up fast per switch. A touch screen is $75 in quantity and replaces many switches.
criddell
Because cars have long design times and a big touchscreen have generally been seen as more premium than a bunch of push buttons and dials. I think the tide has turned somewhat, but it’s going to take some time.
jama211
Because being more expensive than a competitor for something most consumers don’t care about is a hit to sales.
cortesoft
No, but every cost cut is additional profit
WarOnPrivacy
> designing and manufacturing custom molds for each knob and function ... dash does have a cost.
Manufacturing car components already involves designing and custom molds, does it not? Compared to the final purchase price, the cost of adding knobs to that stack seems inconsequential.
bluGill
Yes, but the touch screen is one large mold. The button needs a custom mold for each button. The touch screen also has large flat areas with reduces cost since is prevents extra cost round shapes.
antisthenes
Yeah, seems like a really weird cope to defend the automakers.
Your average transmission will have an order of magnitude more parts that also needed to be designed and produced with much higher precision.
The interior knob controls are just a rounding error in the cost structure.
aspenmayer
Power abhors a vacuum. Choosing to not change is viewed as failure to innovate, even if the design suffers. Planned obsolescence is as old as the concept of yearly production models themselves, and likely older, going back to replacement parts manufacturing and standardized production overtaking piecework.
It’s a race to the bottom to be the least enshittified versus your market competitors. Usability takes a backseat to porcine beauty productization.
weinzierl
I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else.
I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.
IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears.
Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?
nine_k
Some people complain about "visual clutter". Too many stimuli in the field of view assault their attention, and ruin their concentration. Such people want everything that's not in the focus of attention be gone, or at least be inconspicuous.
Some people are like airliner pilots. They enjoy every indicator to be readily visible, and every control to be easily within reach. They can effortlessly switch their focus.
Of course, there is a full range between these extremes.
The default IDE configuration has to do a balancing act, trying to appeal to very different tastes. It's inevitably a compromise.
Some tools have explicit switches: "no distractions mode", "expert mode", etc, which offer pre-configured levels of detail.
musicale
This is a good idea. In basic/beginner mode, every control should be readily visible and discoverable.
musicale
> I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else.
Except that screens on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are larger than ever. Consider the original Macintosh from 1984 – large, visible controls took up a significant portion of its 9" display (smaller than a 10" iPad, monochrome, and low resolution.) Arguably this was partially due to users being unfamiliar with graphical interfaces, but Apple still chose to sacrifice precious and very limited resources (screen real estate, compute, memory, etc.) on a tiny, drastically underpowered (by modern standards) system in the 1980s for interface clarity, visibility, and discoverability. And once displays got larger the real estate costs became negligible.
9dev
> There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab.
Don’t quote me on this, but I vaguely remember there being an option to toggle hiding it, if not in the settings it is in a context menu on the panel.
That thing is a massive time saver, and I agree—keeping it hidden means most people never learn it exists.
autobodie
Intellij on Windows also buries the top menus into a hamburger icon and leaves the entire area they occupied empty! Thankfully there is an option to reverse it deep in the settings, but having it be the default is absolutely baffling.
DidYaWipe
Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using?
This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.
And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.
And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.
So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.
It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
userbinator
No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.
I hate when applications stuff other controls (like browser tabs) into the title bar --- leaving you with no place to grab and move the window.
The irony is that we had title bars when monitors were only 640x480, yet now that they have multiplied many times in resolution, and become much bigger, UIs are somehow using the excuse of "saving space" to remove title bars and introducing even more useless whitespace.
int_19h
This isn't just a Windows thing. Look at Gnome for another example. macOS of late also likes to take over the title bar for random reasons, although there at least the menu bar is still present regardless.
aniforprez
For your complaints about the taskbar, yes I too find it incredibly annoying that they compress all the application windows into a tiny thumbnail but there is a setting to expand thumbnails to include titles and separate them if there are multiple windows which is what I use. I don't currently have access to my windows machine or I'd help you out with the exact setting but it's there somewhere in the "taskbar settings"
ryncewynd
I agree, I know those buttons are there and how to activate them, but I still occasionally stare blankly at the screen wondering where the buttons are before remembering I need to hover them
wizardforhire
In some apps I don’t know more controls are not hidden, at least have the option to hide them. Looking at you google maps.
WarOnPrivacy
The other day I was locked out of my car
the key fob button wouldn't work
Why didn't I just use my key to get in?
First, you need to know there is a hidden key inside the fob.
Second, because there doesn't appear to be a keyhole on the car door,
you also have to know that you need to disassemble a portion
of the car door handle to expose the keyhole.
julianlam
This also happened to me in a rental. We drove it off the lot to our hotel a half-hour away before we discovered the remote was busted, with all of our possessions locked inside.
I did know that there must be a physical key (unless Tesla?), and the only way I found the keyhole was because a previous renter had scratched the doorknob to shit trying to access the very same keyhole.
jahewson
I'm yet to drive a car with a doorknob but it sounds awesome.
jama211
All of which you should know, and can be easily found with a quick google. The moment we got a car with no physical key my first question was “what’s the backup option and how does it work”.
Basic knowledge about the things you own isn’t hard. My god there is a lot of old man shakes fist at cloud in here.
sheiyei
This is such an Apple user take. "Yes you can do that, but you're not supposed to so it's hidden behind so many menus that you can't find it except by accident and since I use it, I say sowwy to my phone every night before I go to sleep to make sure Apple doesn't get maddy mad at me"
nsriv
Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away.
First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.
RachelF
Similarly the disappearing menu items in common software.
Take a simple example: Open a read-only file in MS Word. There is no option to save? Where's it gone? Why can I edit but not save the file?
A much better user experience would be to enable and not hide the Save option. When the user tries to save, tell them "I cannot save this file because of blah" and then tell them what they can do to fix it.
cosmic_cheese
The Mac HIG specifies exactly this: don’t hide temporarily unavailable options, disable them. Disabling communicates to the user the relationships between data, state, etc and adds discoverability.
int_19h
This has been the norm on every desktop. But lately I don't think app designers know what "HIG" even is. Everything is web (or tries real hard to look like it even when it's native apps...), which is to say, everything is broken.
int_19h
I had the same story, which is why the last phone I got for my grandma was an iPhone SE (which still has the home button). This way, no matter where she ends up, there's this large and obvious thing that she can press to return back to the familiarity of the home screen.
strogonoff
I am firmly in the “key UI elements should be visible” camp. I also agree that Apple violates that rule occasionally.
However, I think they do a decent job at resisting it in general, and specifically I disagree that removing the home button constitutes hiding an UI element. I see it as a change in interaction, after which the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself. It is debatable whether it is intuitive or better in general, but I personally think it is rather similar to double-clicking an icon to launch an app, or right-clicking to invoke a context menu: neither have any visual cues, both are used all the time for some pretty key functions, but as soon as it becomes an intuition it does not add friction.
You may say Apple is way too liberal in forcing new intuitions like that, and I would agree in some cases (like address bar drag on Safari!), but would disagree in case of the home button (they went with it and they firmly stuck with it, and they kept around a model with the button for a few more years until 2025).
Regarding explaining the lack of home button: on iOS, there is an accessibility feature that puts on your screen a small draggable circle, which when pressed displays a configurable selection of shortcuts—with text labels—including the home button and a bunch of other pretty useful switches. Believe it or not, I know people who kept this circle around specifically when hardware home button was a thing, because they did not want to wear out the only thing they saw as a moving part!
fauigerzigerk
>the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself.
Right, but a button is there to be pressed while it's not obvious that an edge is a control at all. On top of that, swiping up from the bottom edge triggers two completely different actions depending on the exact timing of lifting your finger off the screen.
Why not move the physical home button to the back of the phone?
Jaxan
I still have my iPhone with home button. That’s also a solution ;-)
zhivota
I am the same, long time Android user and when I borrow my wife's iPhone it is an exercise in frustration. Interactions are hidden, not intuitive, or just plain missing.
Now that Pixel cameras outclass iPhone cameras, and even Samsung is on par, there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO.
Aeolun
> there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO
Not having anything to do with Google is a pretty good reason I think.
sheiyei
The best one, unfortunately it's a terrible user experience for a high cost.
SoftTalker
> [iPhone] Interactions are hidden, not intuitive, or just plain missing.
And they aren't even consistent from app to app. That's perhaps the most frustrating thing.
cosmic_cheese
That’s thanks to third party devs, not Apple. If you look primarily at proper native UIKit/SwiftUI apps, there’s a lot more consistency, but there’s a lot of cross platform lowest common denominator garbage out there that pays zero mind to platform conventions.
You see this under macOS, too. A lot of Electron apps for instance replace the window manager’s standard titlebar with some custom thing that doesn’t implement chunks of the standard titlebar’s functionality. It’s frustrating.
jama211
If you were a long time iphone user you’d say the same thing about android. It’s just about what you’re used to dude.
matsemann
Not really. In Android there will be a back button, on iPhone you're supposed to know to swipe in some direction. On Android there will be a button to show running apps, on iPhone you will need to swipe correctly from somewhere. When 3d touch existed I think there were like 11 different ways of pressing the home button depending on context.
zmmmmm
I think the article overlooks that it is not really an accident that apps and operating systems are hiding all their user interface affordances. It's an antipattern to create lock in, and it tends to occur once a piece of software has reached what they consider saturation point in terms of growth where keeping existing users in is more important than attracting new ones. It so turns out that the vast majority of software we use is created by companies in exactly that position - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta etc.
It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.
eddythompson80
I think you picked a hypothesis and assumed it was true and ran with it.
Consider that all the following are true (despite their contradictions):
- "Bloated busy interface" is a common complaint of some of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. people here share a blank vscode canvas and complain about how busy the interface is compared to their 0-interface vim setup.
- flat design and minimalism are/were in fashion (have been for few years now).
- /r/unixporn and most linux people online who "rice" their linux distros do so by hiding all controls from apps because minimalism is in fashion
- Have you tried GNOME recently?
Minimal interface where most controls are hidden is a certain look that some people prefer. Plenty of people prefer to "hide the noise" and if they need something, they are perfectly capable to look it up. It's not like digging in manuals is the only option
cosmic_cheese
If I had to pin most of this on anything I’d pick two:
- Dribbble-driven development, where the goal is to make apps look good in screenshots with little bearing to their practical usability
- The massive influx of designers from other disciplines (print, etc) into UI design, who are great at making things look nice but don’t carry many of the skills necessary to design effective UIs
Being a good UI designer is seeking out existing usability research, conducting new research to fill in the gaps, and understanding the limits of the target platform on top of having a good footing in the fundamentals. The role is part artist, part scientist, and part engineer. It’s knowing when to put ego aside and admit that the beautiful design you just came with isn’t usable enough to ship. It’s not just a sense for aesthetics and the ability to wield Photoshop or Figma or whatever well.
This is not what hiring selects for, though, and that’s reflected in the precipitous fall in quality of software design in the past ~15 years.
troupo
> Dribbble-driven development,
I've been calling modern designers "dribbble-raised" for a while now precisely for these reasons. Glad to see I'm not the only one.
zmmmmm
I agree with you it's very fashion driven and hence you see it in all kinds of places outside the core drivers of it. But my argument is, those fashions themselves are driven by the major players deciding to do this for less than honorable reasons.
I do think it's likely more passive than active. People at Google aren't deviously plotting to hide buttons from the user. But what is happening is that when these designs get reviewed, nobody is pushing back - when someone says "but how will the user know to do that?", it doesn't get listend to. Instead the people responsible are signing off on it saying, "it's OK, they will just learn that, once they get to know it, then it will be OK". It's all passive but it's based on an implicit assumption that uses are staying around and optimising for the ones that do, making it harder for the ones that want to come and go or stop in temporarily.
Once three or four big companies start doing it, everybody else cargo cults it and before you know it, it looks like fashion and GNOME is doing it too.
jterrys
UIs tend to have a universality with how people structure their environments. Minimalism is super hot outside of software design too. Millennial Gray is a cliche for a reason. Frutiger Aero wasn't just limited to technology. JLo's debut single is pretty cool about this aesthetic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYfkl-HXfuU
joe_the_user
I think you picked a hypothesis and assumed it was true and ran with it.
The tone of your post and especially this phrase is inappropriate imo. The GP's comment is plausible. You're welcome to make a counter-argument but you seem to be claiming without evidence their was no thinking behind their post.
thaumasiotes
> Have you tried GNOME recently?
God, no. I switched to xfce when GNOME decided that they needed to compete with Unity by copying whatever it did, no matter how loudly their entire user base complained.
Why would I try GNOME again?
leakycap
> Why would I try GNOME again?
It is widely used, the default DE in many installs, and it can be handy to be familiar with, for starters.
BLKNSLVR
It's a double edged sword though in that it can discourage users from trying their interface.
Apple's interface shits me because it's all from that one button, and I can never remember how to get to settings because I use that interface so infrequently, so Android feels more natural. Ie. Android has done it's lock-in job, but Apple has done itself a disservice.
(Not entirely fair, I also dislike Apple for all the other same old argument reasons).
userbinator
I see nonprofit OSS projects doing it too, and wonder if they're just trendchasing without thinking. Firefox's aggravating redesigns fall under this category, as does Gnome and the like.
userbinator
This is what happens when "designers" who are nothing more than artists take control of UI decisions. They want things to look "clean" at the expense of discoverability and forget that affordances make people learn.
Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
jama211
Next you’ll be complaining that the taps in your house don’t have a label telling you that they need to be twisted and in what direction.
Phones aren’t 747’s, and guess what every normal person that goes into an airplane cockpit who isn’t a pilot is so overwhelmed by all the controls they wouldn’t know what anything did.
Interface designers know what they’re doing. They know what’s intuitive and what isn’t, and they’ve refined down to an art how to contain a complicated feature set in a relatively simple form factor.
The irony of people here with no design training that they could do a better job than any “so called designer” shows incredible levels of egotism and disrespect to a mature field of study.
Also demonstrably, people use their phones really quite well with very little training, that’s a modern miracle.
Stop shaking your fist at a cloud.
userbinator
Interface designers know what they’re doing. They know what’s intuitive and what isn’t
No they don't. The article refutes your points entirely, as does everyone else here who has been confounded by puzzling interfaces.
StellarScience
We have a user interface design rule that keyboard shortcuts and context menus must only be "shortcuts" for commands that are discoverable via clear buttons or menus. That probably makes our apps old-fashioned.
I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.
Animats
Corners and edges are rarely used that way. They should be. See "Fitts Law".[1]
My metaverse client normally presents a clean 3D view of the world. If you bring the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen, the menu bar and controls appear. They stay visible as long as the cursor is over some control, then, after a few seconds, they disappear.
This seems to be natural to users. I deliberately don't explain it, but everybody finds the controls, because they'll move the mouse and hit an edge.
kulahan
This is easily one of the most frustrating parts of the user experience on Discord. So many buttons are hidden until you mouse over them, which absolutely drives me UP A WALL. I really hope this trend discontinues.
ozim
I love how everyone is UX/UI specialists in this thread :) exactly like in projects I worked for, everyone had something to say in that area.
padolsey
Agree utterly. It's a real shame, and severely affects accessibility for disabled and elderly people. Not only UI discoverability but also the types of swiping or holding movements required on mobile devices. The initial mobile interfaces felt way more accessible, so I don't think its an implicit implication of limited screen real-estate. This has been a trend-driven flattening of UI, with aesthetics over functionality. The palm and compaq pilots felt sublime to use, and the ipod and early mp3 players were fine, as was the originally charming iphone skeudomorphic iconography. It's all been downhill since then.
josephg
I don’t know that I agree. Take reading HN comments on my phone. There’s dozens of UI controls that are hidden behind a few buttons at the top or bottom of the screen. Getting that stuff out of the way makes the page itself take up almost all of my phone screen - and that makes the webpage much more beautiful and enjoyable. My phone screen is only so large. The palm pilot era equivalent browser would fill half the screen with buttons and controls and scroll bars, leaving much less room for the website content.
In my opinion, hidden controls aren’t bad per se. But they are something you have to learn to use. That makes them generally worse for beginners and (hopefully) better for experts. It’s a trade off and sometimes getting users to learn your UI is the right decision. I’m glad my code editor puts so much power at my fingertips. I’m glad git is so powerful. I don’t want a simplified version of git if it means giving up some of its power.
That said, I think we have gone way too far toward custom per-app controls. If you’re going to force users to learn your UI conventions, those learnings should apply to other applications on the same platform. Old platforms like the palm were amazing for this - custom controls were incredibly rare. When you learned to use a palm pilot, you could use all the apps on it.
temporallobe
My car’s audio system seems to go out of its way to bury sound settings (bass, treble, balance, etc.) in as many nested menus as possible. And when you do finally find the settings, they are greyed out. I had to actually watch a youtube video to figure out that they are configured at the individual source level. Super confusing and unintuitive, and especially egregious considering that this is in a vehicle you are DRIVING - confusion, distraction, and frustration are the last things you want drivers to experience.
pipe2devnull
I would argue though you shouldn’t be messing with treble and bass settings while you are driving.
temporallobe
Respectfully disagree. My point is that it should be easy and intuitive to do things like this while driving, just like anything else such as adjusting HVAC controls, operating turn signals, shifting gears, etc. Most major controls and operations should be tactile and easily understandable even if you have never driven that particular car before. I believe that drivers feel more distracted by modern vehicles’ UI/UX than ever before, and I rented a BMW last year that perfectly exemplifies this. It was a nightmare of unintuitive screens and menus just to do basic things - actively driving or not. It really turned me off to BMWs.
mook
I imagine that makes having the settings be specific to each source even worse. How else are you going to adjust them for navigation instructions?
My car has something like that, but thankfully I have only needed to adjust volume, which can be done from the steering wheel…
bluGill
but I'm not driving - my wife is. Thus I should be able to mess with those settings
hamburglar
I used to drive a Camry where on the factory radio, bass and treble had individual knobs and you could adjust them without taking your eyes off the road. Oh, those were the days.
userbinator
Some had a whole equalizer: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/btcaraudio-v...
vel0city
I fully agree with you on this. If the car is moving you shouldn't really do anything more than previous/next/volume. And of those they should be on the steering wheel.
You want to mess with your equalizer, do it when stopped. IDGAF if it's dozens of physical buttons and knobs and sliders or hidden in menus; you're supposed to be driving not mastering an audio file.
Only tangentially related, and a seemingly lost old-man battle: stop hiding my scrollbar.
Interesting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use).
I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.